


A Twist in Time

by twitchbell



Category: 15th Century CE RPF, Doctor Who, Historical RPF
Genre: Crossover, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-04-05
Updated: 2010-04-05
Packaged: 2017-10-08 17:42:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,363
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/77947
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/twitchbell/pseuds/twitchbell
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Doctor and Ace arrive at Barnet in the late Middle Ages, and Ace is forced to consider the issues of meddling with time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Twist in Time

_Fog._

_A thick web of cloud that snares and blinds. Men blunder past him, deceived and despairing. Dying._

_There is a mist in his mind as he struggles for breath, for a grip on the reality of failure. The looked-for victory has turned sour like wine. The dregs of defeat choke in his throat._

_My Lord Exeter has fallen, they tell him. Oxford has fled the field. And as for his own brother, John — cut down. By Oxford's men, some say …_

_He stands his ground, desperate to rally the men who flee by him. But they've stopped listening. He no longer has the power to move them. The past means nothing._

_He is no one anymore. Just a man in metal harness. Rich pickings to any who can bring him down._

_He runs._

_There is nothing else left to do._

 

"Fog!"

Ace wrinkled her face at the cold, clammy feel of it and glanced around the shrouded wood.

"How long is it going to take to get those readings, Professor?"

"That rather depends on how often I get interrupted." The Doctor's fingers drilled out a fresh calculation on the device he carried.

"All right! I can take a hint! What was that?" Ace narrowed her eyes, peering curiously through the trees.

"What was what?"

"I can hear something, over there. I'll just go take a look..."

The Doctor glanced up. "Well, don't go far … and watch yourself."

"Come on! This is _England_! You've sussed that much!"

"And that makes it safe, does it?"

"Safer than a lot of other places I could mention. This is home territory — and I can take care of myself."

"Maybe," said the Doctor, darkly. "Be back in ten minutes. And don't get lost."

"You mean, not permanently." Ace grinned, raised a hand, and slipped away.

 

_Armour is meant for fighting._

_Now, after over three hours of battle, the weight encloses him like a leaden coffin. Blood pounds at his temples. Breath is agonizingly short._

_Then he sees them._

_Foot soldiers, lightly armed, pikes and halberds at the ready, the Sun in Splendour blazoned across their breast. Edward's symbol. Edward's men._

_And they wait between him and the horses._

 

Ace ducked between the tethered and armoured horses, carefully keeping out of the range of hooves and teeth, her attention drawn to the struggle being waged beyond the animals. The blanketing fog had hidden it from her, and muffled the sound, but now as the morning sun began to burn off the mist, she could see clearly for the first time.

"A battle!" she breathed. "The Professor's only gone and landed us in the middle of a battle. Bleeding knights in armour!" Ace's knowledge of medieval history was limited, and largely culled from television and films. Excalibur, Lancelot and King Arthur were the names that danced hazily, and inaccurately, into mind as she moved forward to gain a better view.

The armed struggle she found herself witnessing was clearly a very one-sided affair. A dozen or so men, armed with long pikeshafts, had all but surrounded a much smaller force, grouped alongside an armoured man. That the latter were fighting for their lives, and that their defence was doomed, was readily apparent. Ace winced as a pike thrust took one man in the throat, his gurgling scream cut suddenly and bloodily short by the hack of a dagger. One by one, his red-jacketed comrades joined him in death, cut down as they fought to protect their master. Finally, the armoured man stood alone.

He must be a great lord of men, Ace thought. The bloodstained sword and armour glittered coldly in a sudden shaft of sunlight. Ace had only thought of armour as cumbersome and restrictive, but he seemed to be clothed in light and grace. The sun lent a brilliant, heroic clarity to his stance, turning him into a living symbol of chivalry. It was a viewpoint clearly not shared by the soldiers, whose faces reflected only naked aggression as they closed in for the kill.

Ace had run with the pack herself and felt the throb of bloodlust deep in her own gut, but this was something quite different. Far from thrilling to the scent of blood, she felt a sense of outrage and injustice for this would be no fair contest of courage and skill, but slaughter by a brutal, mindless pack. Something bright and shining was about to be brought down and torn to pieces.

"Sod this for a game of soldiers," Ace muttered, delving into her backpack. She drew out a canister and hefted it in her hand, taking a short run forward. "Oi!" she screamed. "Try this for size!"

The canister exploded on the ground with a muffled thump as Ace flung herself face down. Coughing, she raised her head and discovered that most of the soldiers had been dropped like stones by the force of the explosion. The rest, including the man in armour, were still reeling from the impact. Ace darted towards him, evading the sword that was half-raised at her approach.

"Come on!" she yelled. "Get out while you can!"

Her words registered and he broke into a ragged run towards the horses. Ace chased after him, not entirely convinced that he could get on a horse in that gear, especially given the fact that he still seemed to be half-dazed from the explosion.

"Hang on! Let me give you a hand!"

He didn't hesitate very long — after all, what did he have to lose? — before lowering the sword. Ace eyed him in consternation. Just how did you help someone climb on a horse when they were wearing armour, she wondered. That was the trouble with school history — it never taught you anything useful.

He raised his visor with his free hand. His face was older than Ace had anticipated. His eyes were dark, almost black, and his gaze held a bleak and haunting intensity.

"Help me mount."

Please and thank you didn't seem to be part of the knightly vocabulary, or maybe urgency had driven out politeness. He was clearly accustomed to handing out orders- and to being obeyed.

Remembering a film she'd once seen, Ace cupped her hands and braced herself to receive his weight. He didn't exactly spring lightly into the saddle — it was more of a scramble — but, given Ace's inexperience and the fact that he was probably half shell-shocked, it was something to cheer about that he got there at all.

"Good luck, mate," she said.

He stayed the horse a moment, looking down at her. Then, as if this was all the acknowledgement he could spare, the jewelled spurs raked the horse's flanks and it sprang forward.

Ace watched him go, and then released a long breath. At least she'd made her presence count for something. Then she came back to her senses with a jolt. The Doctor. He'd had more than enough time to collect those readings by now, and he'd be concerned for her. A battleground was hardly the safest place to linger, after all. Ace broke into a run.

Around her, the fog lifted still further, burned away by bright light, by a sun in splendour.

 

The Doctor was waiting impatiently for Ace just outside the open TARDIS door.

"Finished?" Ace asked breathlessly. "Because there's — "

"Yes, yes, I know," the Doctor snapped hurriedly. "Get inside — hurry! Now that I know where and when we are, I have no inclination to linger."

Inside the TARDIS with the doors closed, they both relaxed slightly. The Doctor busied himself around the console, setting coordinates.

"I would just nip forward in time, but I seem to recall parking the TARDIS somewhere around Barnet once before, and I'd rather not run the risk of colliding with myself. Forgive me for shouting, Ace. The fault was mine; I shouldn't have let you wander off like that."

"I was all right." Ace shrugged. "It got nasty, but I handled it. Even saved a life."

"Good!" The Doctor looked up at her and frowned. "Say that again. You did what?"

"I saved a life," Ace repeated. "There was this man in armour and — "

The Doctor drew in a sharp breath. "And do you know who he was?"

"Come on! There was a war on out there! We didn't exactly have time to exchange names and addresses!"

"But you must have noticed whether he was wearing any particular emblems or colours. Think, Ace!"

"The soldiers who were with him had red jackets with white branches on. And he had this sort of tiny gold ornament on his helmet — I think it was a bear. Look, why is this important?"

The Doctor sighed, but some of the tension seemed to ebb from him at her words. "You interfered," he said heavily. "Ace, I'd rather you didn't, not under these sort of circumstances. Although it's unlikely that any interference by you would have a long term effect, meddling in time by amateurs should not be taken lightly."

"_What_?" Ace stared at him in total bewilderment. "We meddle all the time!"

"_I_ meddle, as you call it, all the time," the Doctor corrected her. "That's my job, Ace."

"And we're always interfering, changing things — "

The Doctor shook his head. "No, we're not. We're fulfilling our roles, taking our place in a pattern."

"But we change history!"

"No, Ace, we're merely part of it, rewriting, occasionally, the details of particular episodes."

"Are you saying that everything's fixed, that there's no free will, and it doesn't matter what we do because everything will end up the same anyway?"

"That's a rather garbled and inaccurate summary of a very complex law. No one governs our free will, Ace. It's the result of the exercise of free will that forms the pattern. Did you really imagine that the Universe was composed of a random series of events, without shape and form?"

"But with time travel, there must be paradoxes – things must get changed!"

"Not as easily as you'd think. Oh yes, details in the pattern can be altered or twisted, but the overall effect remains the same."

"You mean the pattern can't ever be broken?"

"That depends. Some patterns are so loosely woven that they can be altered under certain circumstances. The Monk and the Master have tried … I've even attempted it myself, only to end up confirming the very pattern I wanted to amend. It's not as easy as you might think to change things on a permanent basis, although there was an outside chance of it happening here, which is why I had to question you."

"But I _did_ change something. I told you, I saved somebody's life!"

"Do you think so?" The Doctor regarded her, not without sympathy. "Yes, I can see that you do. Tell me, Ace, precisely what change did you envisage when you gaily pitched in to save this particular knight in shining armour?"

"I didn't think of anything _precisely_, but –"

"No, you didn't _think_, Ace. You responded emotionally without even pausing to consider the consequences. You were not rescuing Sir Lancelot, you were rescuing the Earl of Warwick, known in your time as the Kingmaker, and his survival would most likely have meant a further round in that nasty spat of internecine warfare that Sir Walter Scott romantically christened the Wars of the Roses."

"I didn't know —"

"No? Well, it's often held that ignorance is no excuse." The Doctor softened. "Think twice another time, Ace. I have what you might call a license to meddle. On your own, you don't. This time, no harm came of it, but —"

"You don't understand," Ace interrupted. "It doesn't matter _who_ he was, I still saved his life."

"No, Ace. You merely postponed his death. That's all."

"You mean, he still died there?" Ace couldn't contain her sense of shock. "But I —"

"You twisted a thread, but the pattern was too firmly fixed to be broken. All the strands that brought Warwick to that place were bound up and finished there. He died because it was meet and because it was meant."

"So what happened to free will?" Ace demanded.

"It was free will that brought him there. No one forced him into rebellion against the king he'd helped create. None of us are passive victims of fate, Ace. We all make our own places in the pattern, and Warwick chose to forge his with blind ambition."

Ace was silent for a moment, then, "And how come you're so sure he still died there?"

The Doctor eyed her reflectively for a second or so. "Because just before your arrival, I was using the scanner to try and find you. I saw it happen."

"_Don't_!" Ace snapped at him. Then she drew a deep breath. "Look, I don't care about the rules of your little Time Lord games! That wasn't a game out there; it was _real_. I thought I'd saved a man's life, and it hurts that I didn't, even if he wasn't really Sir Lancelot at all. So I just don't want to hear about him dying, okay?"

 

_He is surrounded._

_With terrible efficiency, they hook their pikes into his armour and twist, dragging him from the saddle. The force of the fall knocks the remaining breath and fight from him._

_Kill the lords and spare the commons._

_He's had many lords dispatched at his command, and now —_

_Now he lies helpless at the pleasure of the commons._

_He fights for breath, to bargain, even at the end to plead. But the men who tug at his visor as he sprawls helpless in their grip are concerned with nothing save the value of his polished armour, jewelled sword belt and spurs._

_They tear off both gauntlets and rip the rings from his fingers. Each one of them will buy them a small manor._

_There is a sudden light as the visor snaps open._

_A blaze of sun brands itself against his eyes._

_And dies as the dagger falls._

 

THE END

 

POSTSCRIPT:

Inscription from Barnet High Stone:

_HERE was fought the famous BATTLE Between EDWARD the 4th and the EARL of WARWICK April the 14th ANNO 1471 in which the EARL was Defeated and Slain_


End file.
